Guest blog post from New Rules of Investing:

Interesting how an investor relates to a deeper understanding in a portfolio company after making the investment. Roger Ehrenberg is an investor in StockTwits.  As Roger mentions in a recent blog post, StockTwits recently release a new version of StockTwits where users can insert a ‘$’ sign before any mention of a specific stock, effectively tagging the twit with a specific stock to be included on stock pages within the StockTwits site.

Roger recently quipped about a big issue he had regarding Twitter and its ability to pair-up users with the same interests.  “If StockTwits didn’t exist, it would be much harder to find people with similar interests where one could easily be inserted into the dialogue.”

Now, as more vertical applications are being built upon the Twitter platform, Roger forsees a movement “that facilitate[s] the creation of communities that interact on Twitter but can dig in deeper elsewhere (like StockTwits), Twitter’s power as an enabling platform is rapidly coming into view.”

I found it interesting to see that Ehrenberg invested before this greater appreciation of Twitter’s ability to act as a communications platform for more vertical apps written on top of it.  While StockTwits takes users part of the way — in a sense, it recreates the perennially-broken Yahoo Message Boards into a self-selected conversation with only those stocks and users allowed into the conversation  — it will be interesting to see what unfurls next.

StockTwits creates stock pages to aid in stock discovery and promote a hierarchy of experts within the StockTwit community.  Any meta information — most commented on stocks or performance metrics — would enhance the value of all the information being created.  It still doesn’t address the problem, however, of how Joe the Plumber or Bill the Doctor decides how to build and manage his portfolio.

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